The technological divide
2Also known as a cultural divide.
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(I’ve never seen so much of this in one place before.)
Anyone have anything else to add?
- 6 comments, 4 replies
- Comment
What’s the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman?
The car salesman knows when he’s lying to you.
@blaineg Truth on both sides.
To be honest, I was hoping it would be a lot funnier.
As a programmer, I know there are funny jokes out there; that article had a few of them. But most of it was … meh. Which, I suppose, is fitting.
I wonder if the “unfunny” ones (for me) are funnier for non-programmers? Or do I just have my humor filters tuned wrong?
FWIW, these were my favorites:
Not one mention of Fortran!
@PooltoyWolf Fortran! (There, took care of it for you.)
Actually, FORTRAN was my first programming language to learn. FORTRAN II to be exact. Soon after, FORTRAN IV came out. (Never was a III, best of my knowledge.)
Edit: There was a III, but it was not released.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_III
I actually did most of my FORTRAN programming in a clone (?) called WatFor (Waterloo Fortran) that was better with diagnostics, for students to learn with. Soon after, they updated to WatFiv, which was the FORTRAN IV version.
(little known trivia?)
@phendrick I think it’s cool that it’s still being used!
Many programmers act like they can use or learn any language, but will avoid FORTRAN or COBOL, and maybe Basic. But only one language strikes fear in every programmer’s heart: vba.
This is not due to any particular deficiency in vba’s construction, as many languages have similar issues. No, it is due to how and where vba is used. Vba (and a terrible development tool) is built into Excel, but has a much longer reach, able call libraries that Excel should never be able to access. Vba is the tool of the engineer that just needs to get this working for a bit and will build it properly later (and this was 10 years ago and we both know that it was never rebuilt, as soon as it half worked it was stuck in production). Vba is the language of the never reviewed, never documented, never tested, production critical tool. The vba tool probably runs on an old box in the corner that has Excel 2003, because it didn’t work on Excel 2007 and they weren’t sure why.
But today the spreadsheet that runs the plant isn’t working and Bill who wrote it retired a few years ago to spend time with his grandkids. Couldn’t you just take a look at it real quick? It’s probably something easy. Then we can get the plant up and running again. We’re all counting on you.
One of my favorite programmer jokes from ~30 years ago:
Have you heard about the new object oriented COBOL compiler?
It’s called ADD ONE TO COBOL